Contact Album Plug-In for Adium

Something for the Mac users this time. I have written a little plug-in for Adium recently.
It can be downloaded and installed from the Adium Xtras site.

The plug-in, called Contact Album, stores all the icons that your contacts use over time and comes with a viewer for the icons.

click for larger view

After installation of the plug-in, the album will slowly fill with icons as your contacts change them. You can open the album viewer with the Contact Album entry in Adium’s Window menu and with the View Album entry in the context menu for contacts.
Currently the plug-in comes with English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, and Swedish localizations. Further translations are welcome.

I read this comment of yours on the page of your Xtra: “I’d rather fix the problem in Adium before doing an ugly work-around in this plugin”.
This made me wonder whether you might be interested in becoming an Adium contributor/developer. :)

any idea how to prevent the Syncagend to try sync the symlinks to .current ??

i have application Support/Adium on the idisk in order to have settings,logs and now albums in sync on 3 machines …
now every sync i have about 200 messages i have to confirm .. about the file .current (sich links to the current image)

I’ve never used Apple’s Backup program, I don’t know whether you can exclude some files.
Anyway, I’m going to implement a different solution for remembering the most recent icon for the next version of the plugin.

You can re-add delete icons view ‘Edit / Undo’. Of course, this helps right after accidentally deleting icons.

If you want to add icons to the album manually (if you didn’t empty the Trash, you should find the deleted ones there), go to “Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Contact Album” and put the icons in the corresponding folders there (e.g. MSN.youraccount/somecontact”). The plug-in will show them after restarting Adium then.

You know, maybe it would be a good addition to be able to assign custom names and group arbitrary contacts in the album.
I have, prob. like a lot of people, multiple accounts across a dozen chat networks, and numerous double buddies on each, in other words the same buddy on numerous different accounts/networks.
Since the introduction of proxy contact-list entries in Adium, I have given up on trying to combine them into a single contact-list entry since this single contact now shows up in multiple groups in the contact list, since those tend to appear and disappear on a whim. Notable are groups for specific networks like skype. And even better, a grouped account now shows up in the skype group even if skype is not connected, in other words the skype group is still there, only because one of the multiple accounts of that person is connected. Total nightmare!
The whole point of grouping a contact was to reduce space in the contact list, and not have them occupy space in 5 different groups.
Anyway, since contact list albums seems to take its grouping hints from the contact list, that does not work very well for me anymore..
I would like to be able to do that only in contact list album, and also give a name for contacts to be used when only the ID is available, independent of Adium itself, like you mentioned facebook which only knows nicknames when that spec. buddy is actually connected.
Or does it cache the names? Actually I think it does… well.. still I have 200 people in FB that rarely connect so now I have around 100 FB-IDs in my contact list album, which would be nice to name until they actually connect…

Ohh and another thing.. It would be cool, if you could sort, and by that I mean group, the left pane of CLA by either name alphabetically, or by network, so all facebook contacts are grouped, and maybe you can think of some more useful grouping ways…
-V